We watch a lot of animal-based programming, whether it’s about farmlife or wild animals.

Last week, we made daily visits to the arc of fringy boxwood that served as home to a clutch of spiderlings. We look at the bugs that crawl along the patio, or that get stranded on the surface of the pool in the water table. We’ve checked on the full grown spiders who take care of mommy’s peonies.

We’ve even talked about things that are alive and dead – the first dead creature he discovered was a baby bird Far buried, leading Ben to think that dead things happen when cats get them.

So, how to talk about dinosaurs and the world they knew? One way is to play with the wonderful rubbery toy TRexes and triceratopses. We read “How do dinosaurs say goodnight?” and “How do dinosaurs eat their food?” regularly. And we talk about them, about how they lived a very long time ago, even before people, on earth. And where did they live? At a loss, I told him, “The Wild Land, the land without people, beautiful and wild, with plants and animals, some eating plants and some eating other animals.”

Something about that phrase captured Ben’s imagination, and as we were drifting off to sleep, he was talking himself to sleep with “The Wild land, the wild land, the wild land…” This morning, he started his mantra again, calling a place forward in the hopes of bringing it back to life.